U.S.-CUBA: Relief Groups Ponder U.S. Approval For Aid Team

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Jan 7 1997 (IPS) - Washington’s decision to allow a U.S.- based group to send a humanitarian mission to Cuba is a welcome change but does not necessarily indicate a warming in U.S.-Cuban relations, humanitarian groups here argue.

Several U.S. activist groups which have for years tried to send humanitarian relief to Cuba, circumventing the nearly 35-year U.S. embargo against the island, are pleased with Washington’s recent decision to allow a U.S. civil flight into Cuba.

ORBIS, a New York-based non-profit group which counsels on ways to prevent blindness and eye disease, received permission from the U.S. Departments of State, Commerce, and Treasury to spend three weeks in Santiago, Cuba, to train Cuban doctors on how to treat curable blindness.

That decision is the first by the U.S. government to allow civil flights into Cuba since early 1996, when the shooting down of four U.S. pilots by Cuban jets precipitated a new chill in relations between the two countries. Now, ORBIS and other groups dealing with Cuba are wondering whether a thaw is near.

“There was not any delay in processing our request for permission to travel into Cuba,” said ORBIS’ executive director Pina Taormina, who will lead the three-week mission that departs for Cuba Jan. 10. By contrast, she said, the group had to delay its previous trip to Cuba in 1991, when the State Department failed to grant permission for its departure promptly.

Moreover, many groups, including Pastors for Peace, a religious organisation which has tried to send scientific computers to Cuba, have been frustrated for months in their own efforts to provide humanitarian aid to Fidel Castro’s government.

The Rev. Lucius Walker, a leader of Pastors for Peace, said that last year’s shootdown worsened the prospects for aid groups to gain Washington’s nod to send supplies to Cuba.

Taormina downplayed any political significance of the approval granted to ORBIS.

“We are about blindness, and not politics,” she told IPS. “Blindness knows no boundaries…We go wherever we are invited.”

Irving Kessler, a spokesman for New York’s Centre for Cuban Studies, hailed Washington’s decision to allow the ORBIS flight. “I have to applaud such a step,” she said. “But one decision doesn’t alter the situation appreciably.”

“Whenever aid is sent to Cuba, that’s a positive sign,” Rev. Walker agreed. “But that is more than counterbalanced by the imposition of the blockade itself, which is fairly massive and fairly expensive.”

Walker noted that, although the U.S. government has on occasion licensed groups to send a limited amount of humanitarian aid to Cuba, many groups — including Pastors for Peace — object to Washington’s requirement that all U.S. humanitarian groups obtain federal licensing before delivering any aid.

“We don’t believe in licensing; we think it’s a scam,” he argued. “It only serves to legitimise the blockade. While occasionally it serves U.S. political interests to grant licenses for a very small amount of aid…the truth is that the blockade is continuing, and the suffering of the Cuban people is continuing.”

Walker pointed to efforts by Pastors for Peace to send 400 medical computers to Cuba. The U.S. government blocked the attempt because the group had nïR,.¡YY3or licensing. The United Methodist Church eventually sent the computers in contravention of U.S. law, as they similarly refused to seek licensing.

The imposition of such laws has hardly varied since the embargo was first imposed in 1962. Kessler argued that there has never been any dramatic shift in Washington’s efforts to isolate the Castro government, and that none is likely in the future.

“The expectation that (U.S. President Bill) Clinton would soften ties existed in the minds of journalists,” he said. “Clinton has never made any move that would indicate he is interested in normalising those ties.”

However, one year after he supported a tightening of the U.S. embargo on Cuba, Clinton last Friday announced that, for the second time, he would suspend U.S. penalties against companies in other countries that deal with Cuban property deemed to have been confiscated from U.S. citizens.

Suspension of those penalties — the harshest provisions in the Helms-Burton law which is designed to tighten the embargo — will remain in place for another six months.

But Clinton made it clear that the opinions of U.S. allies mattered more than any change of heart on Cuba. Europe and Canada have loudly objected to the Helms-Burton Act as an infringement of their sovereign right to trade with nations.

“The international community is more united behind the cause of freedom in Cuba than ever before in the 38-year-old history of Castro’s oppressive regime,” Clinton said. “I would expect to continue suspending the right to file suit so long as America’s friends and allies continue their stepped-up efforts to promote a transition to democracy in Cuba.”

Kessler noted, “He suspended the provisions of the Helms- Burton bill in deference to the wishes of the rest of the world, not to Cuba.” For now, he argued, the bottom line is that Washington may seek normalisation with former Communist nemeses like China, Vietnam, and even North Korea, but Cuba remains as much a target for U.S. politicians as ever.